Charles W. Pickering - Background

Background

A native of Laurel in Jones County in eastern Mississippi, Pickering received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1959 from the University of Mississippi at Oxford. He then procured his LL.B. in 1961 from the University of Mississippi School of Law.

Active in the early 1960s in the Democratic Party, Pickering switched affiliation in 1964 to the Mississippi Republican Party. He said at the time that "the people of were heaped with humiliation and embarrassment at the Democratic Convention" in Atlantic City, New Jersey, after the national party seated two civil rights activists from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party with the all-white delegation that Pickering had supported. Along with other disaffected Democrats, Pickering played a key role in building the Republican Party in Mississippi in the ensuing years.

As a young prosecutor in the sixties, Pickering worked closely with the Federal Bureau of Investigation to pursue the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi. In 1966, he testified against Klan member Sam Bowers, who was being tried for the murder of civil rights activist Vernon Damer. After testifying, Pickering and his family needed FBI protection. The Klan later claimed victory when Pickering ran unsuccessfully for the state legislature. The Senate Congressional Record from October 30, 2003 confirms that Pickering worked with the FBI.

Pickering was appointed and served as city prosecuting attorney in Laurel and was thereafter elected and served four years as the Jones County prosecutor. He served briefly as Laurel municipal judge and was elected to two terms in the Mississippi State Senate, having served from 1972 to 1980. In 1978, he sought the Republican nomination for the United States Senate seat that was being vacated by the veteran Democrat James O. Eastland, but he lost his party's nomination to U.S. Representative Thad Cochran. Thereafter, Cochran in a three-way general election defeated Democrat Maurice Dantin and Independent Charles Evers, a figure in the civil rights movement. In 1979, Pickering was the Republican nominee for state attorney general, having been defeated by the Democrat and later Governor Bill Allain. He ran on the ticket headed for the second consecutive time by the GOP gubernatorial nominee, businessman Gil Carmichael of Meridian. From 1976 to 1978, Pickering also was the chairman of the Mississippi Republican Party.

In 1976, Pickering chaired the subcommittee of the Republican Party's Platform Committee that called for a Ccnstitutional amendment that would have overruled Roe v. Wade. In 1984, as president of the Mississippi Baptist Convention, Pickering was presiding when the Convention adopted a resolution calling for legislation to outlaw abortion except when necessary to preserve a woman's life.

On October 2, 1990, Pickering was appointed to the United States District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi by U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush.